Shopping carts found in grocery stores, hardware stores and general merchandise stores are customarily provided by such stores for the convenience of patrons both in toting purchases within the stores, as well as from the stores' check-out counters to the patrons' vehicles in the store parking lots. For those store patrons who have vehicles in the store parking lots, upon reaching their respective vehicles and transferring their purchases to the trunks or other portions of their vehicles, they have no further use for the carts. Consequently, such patrons either leave the carts in and about the parking lot, or in some cart receiving stand which may be conveniently placed in the parking lots, for retrieval by store personnel and return to the store entrance area for use by subsequently arriving patrons. Unfortunately, however, many store patrons may not come to the store in cars or other vehicles, and, where the patron may have purchased one or more weighty items, the patron is often tempted to place them in a shopping cart provided by the store and simply to wheel the cart not only out of the store, but out of the store's parking lot and to the patron's residence or other destination. When this is done by store patrons, the carts are frequently left somewhere on the sidewalk adjacent to the patron's residence or in some other public location. The carts may then be picked up by a retrieval service with some type of truck or other vehicle onto which the carts may be placed. This, however, represents an added expense to the store to secure the return of its shopping carts, but it is considered worthwhile since the carts may cost the store as much as $125.00 to $150.00 a piece and those carts which are now being equipped with TVs and VCRs for advertising store merchandise may cost considerably more. These latter carts, moreover, are powered by batteries which must be recharged, sometimes daily. In addition, if so many carts are removed that none are available for any substantial number of customers, the latter may limit their purchases or make none at all, to the store's business loss.
Of greater concern to the stores, however, is the tendency for some patrons, particularly those who may be homeless, to wheel the carts out of the parking lots and use them for convenient carriers for their personal belongings such as clothes, bedrolls, etc. The carts so utilized are usually secreted somewhere, when not in use on public thoroughfares, so that they cannot be retrieved by any pick-up service employed by the store. In such cases, store identification plates or markings may be removed by such cart thieves, and where the carts are of a commonly used variety, it becomes difficult for even a retrieval service to determine the identity of the store to which the cart should be returned. In effect, then, the carts are simply lost and must be replaced by the store at costs stated above. Depending upon the site of the store and the nature of the population in its immediate vicinity, store cart losses can vary substantially. In poorer areas, cart thefts may be of such magnitude as to force the store to charge much greater prices than normal simply to cover its cart losses.
Recognizing the problem of cart thefts, a number of efforts have been directed to providing systems for rendering carts immobile when they are moved out of the store parking lot or beyond a certain distance from the store. Examples of such prior art systems may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,242,668, 4,772,880, 3,652,103 and 3,495,688.
In U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,242,668 and 4,772,880, radio transmitters are used to trigger some type of solenoid actuated by a receiver on the cart which receiver is responsive to the transmitter under certain conditions. When the solenoid is actuated, the wheel is suddenly locked.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,652,103, a locking solenoid is triggered by a light beam, while in U.S. Pat. No. 3,495,688, a locking solenoid is magnetically actuated.
In a different area of technology, systems have been provided for discouraging animals from passing over a certain perimeter defined by some type of radiating fencing which, when the animal, such as a dog, approaches too closely, may produce conditions disliked by the dog. A patent in this area is U.S. Pat. No. 3,753,421.
In addition, a company by the name of Kart Kontrol Inc. of Alta Loma, Calif., has experimented with providing perimeter control for shopping carts, but little has been heard concerning the same since an announcement in the Jan. 4, 1990, Glendale (California) Daily News.
For one reason or another, none of the various systems for preventing cart thefts appears to have been adopted by any stores. A principal reason for this failure, despite the need, has been the expense involved in setting up the system and installing its signal reactive components in the shopping carts. Obviously, if the cost of providing the system and the components for each cart closely approaches the cost of the cart itself, or exceeds the store's overall economic loss through cart thefts, it is not, as a practical matter, worth the trouble and expense to have a system adopted. It appears that this economic factor has militated strongly against the adoption of any of the prior art cart anti-theft systems.
Another problem with prior art devices is that where the wheel disabling mechanism is some type of solenoid which may thrust a locking pin into some portion of the wheel and suddenly prevents its rotation, the immediate stopping could be hazardous not only to persons attempting to steal the carts, but also to patrons who are simply using the carts for normal purposes. A sudden locking of a cart wheel could result in spilling the contents of a full cart, or even throwing out a small child who may be riding in the cart. A lawsuit against the store might be a result.
For whatever reason, to the knowledge of the present inventors, no cart anti-theft system has been successfully tried and found to be economically feasible; hence, none has been adopted despite the need.